Jamal al-Dirrah and 12-year-old Mohammed were cowering against a wall in Gaza, seeking shelter from the rain of gunshots between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers, the terrified boy screaming in the crook of his father’s arm. Moments later, the boy slumped dead and his father lay wounded with eight bullets in his body.

I knew a Palestinian named Jamal. I sat in my garden looking at the wall he’d built for me when a team of Palestinians had helped build my Israeli house at the height of the intifada. His first son, I recalled, was born 12 years ago, shortly after my daughter. I thought how easily the anonymous victim might have been the Jamal I knew, with whom I’d had an uneasy relationship that tentatively grew into something else.

Then I read in the newspaper that the dead boy’s father, 37 years old, was a house painter from Gaza who worked for Israelis in the suburbs north of Tel Aviv. The same first name, the same job in the same area, the same general age. Too many coincidences.

I studied the photo more closely. What if? It was too blurry to see, the man’s head turned away. To put my suspicions to rest I telephoned Moshe Tamam, the Israeli contractor for whom Jamal works. “Tell me, Moshe, the man in the hospital, that’s not our Jamal?”

But the contractor told me the news I didn’t want to hear.

I telephoned the hospital in Amman, Jordan, where Jamal had gone for surgery, and I was able to reach him. “A crime!” said Jamal. “Forty-five minutes firing without stop. And I cried, ‘My son! My son! My son!’ but nobody listened. Now he is dead and I am half finished. To shoot at a boy; it’s a crime.”

Jamal began to cry. There was commotion in the background, people talking in Arabic, and somebody hung up the telephone.

In the Middle East, I have often observed, people live their lives maneuvering between the headlines. This week our Jamal became a headline.

It was the height of the grass-roots Palestinian uprising, the intifada, when I first met Jamal. In 1988 my husband and I hired a contractor to renovate an old house we had just bought in Tel Aviv’s suburbs. Jamal stood apart from the other Palestinian workers. In his 20s, he was angrier, prouder, with a resentment more palpable. We were never really introduced. I just learned his first name over time, and he learned mine.

Tall, thin and glowering, Jamal spat out his words in low monosyllables. He accepted begrudgingly, without a smile, the cold drinks in paper cups I brought out to the team of workers. But he would never drink my coffee. Shaking his head dismissively and clicking his tongue, he would pad silently to the periphery of my unfinished patio, crouch down on his heels, extract a crumpled nylon bag from his jacket pocket and shake some dark granules into a glass cup to brew his own strong coffee over a little portable gas heater.

The other workers in the crew — Nasser, Abed and Yusuf — were unobtrusive. They bent down in my garden to pray, facing east. I wondered whether they knew about the old mosque atop a seaside cliff at the beach nearby, the mosque where a muezzin no longer calls.

As the workers arrived each morning, the radio reported the injured of the day before — Israeli soldiers wounded by hurled rocks, Palestinians shot, the tear gas fired, the order from army headquarters to break protesters’ limbs, the latest death toll. It was a dark and hateful time. Still the workers came to my house day in and day out, plastering, setting tiles, installing plumbing.

They arrived at dawn, worked quietly, kept their heads down. They considered themselves the lucky ones, the ones with steady work. But when terrorist bombings heated up inside the country, Israel retaliated by sealing off the borders, allowing nobody from the territories occupied by Israel to work inside Israel proper. Sometimes weeks would go by while the men sat in enforced idleness inside Gaza. Then suddenly the order would be rescinded, and construction on my home would start anew.

Part of Jamal’s job involved putting up a garden wall. I was walking next to the newly finished wall when something close to the base caught my eye. I bent down to look closer. “Jamal – 1988″ I saw, inscribed in looping English script letters, the handwriting of a foreign schoolboy. The cement was already dry. Indignant, I went straight to the contractor and insisted a new layer be spread over the offensive signature. It was my house after all, not a public sidewalk. If anybody had a right to make graffiti, it was me.

The next morning the signature had been obliterated, large circles of new gray cement in benign swirls over the words. The new spot dried a different shade of gray than the surrounding wall, and for a few years it was visible if you knew what you were looking for. But with time that difference has faded, and it became hard to discern the place where Jamal had tried to leave his mark.

During the period we were building, my third baby was born. Jamal’s wife was expecting their first child. When I offered my no longer needed maternity clothes, he nodded his head ever so slightly. I packed up a big bundle. I especially liked my navy wool jumper with red piping. The next day I looked until I found Jamal, and happily presented him with the bag. He took it with averted eyes. Months later I found the bag, still full, stuffed into a crevice in an old repainted cupboard, my navy dress in a wrinkled ball.

Then my house was finished and the workers went away.

The years went by, tumultuous ones in Israel. The 1991 Gulf War brought acute fear, then two years later the Oslo accords afforded the first ray of hope for coexistence. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist, things seemed to go back to square one. There was a series of terrorist bombings inside Israel in which hundreds of civilians were killed. In their wake hard-line Benjamin Netanyahu was swept into office. But in the meantime, people living in the Middle East continued to lead their private lives, maneuvering between the headlines.

A couple of years ago, I hired the same contractor to repaint my house. I saw there was a new foreman. He came up my steps limping slightly, thin and wiry, reminding me of the physique of Ahknaton, the elongated Egyptian emperor. When he got close, I saw it was someone I knew. Through the graying hair and bony cheeks I recognized Jamal. He smiled, and I did too. There was something of old friends in our greeting.

I could read in his eyes that I’d gotten older too. I supposed Jamal’s traumas had been much worse than mine, and yet here he was again, after all those years. Years of arising from bed at 3:30 a.m., to take the bus at 4 to the border crossing, and then board a second bus an hour later out of Gaza to start work at 6 a.m. Was it this backbreaking cycle of physical labor that made the 35-year-old man look like he was 50? Yet he was smiling.